Having recently joined The Mira Hong Kong as their Executive Pastry Chef, Smita Grosse has now also become our latest chef advocate thanks to our ongoing partnership with the hotel. The new relationship has been a long time coming, as our founder Jo Soo Tang first reached out to Smita prior to her joining her current team, but circumstances at the time made any collaboration difficult. We’re delighted to finally have her on board, and Smita shares the sentiment.  

“Jo and I became acquainted through a mutual friend called Joanna, but unfortunately at the time I was leaving Grand Hyatt and so it didn’t quite work out,” Smita recalls. “The Mira has been very supportive of r é n, so now that I’ve joined the hotel, I knew it’d be a good time to also be a part of it. I’ve always loved supporting and teaching people who want to learn but might not have had the right opportunities or tools, so working with r é n has always been something I’ve wanted to do.”

Easter is just around the corner, and you can’t have Easter without chocolate eggs, so for our first collaboration together, Smita will be preparing 600 chocolate eggs in her kitchen at The Mira, which will then be donated to r é n. The chocolate eggs will be sold in cartons of six at the COCO Café and Patisserie at The Mira, at any of our own upcoming pop-ups, as well as during our launch event on April 21 at chef-advocate Olivier Elzer’s restaurant Clarence, where our friend and artist David Leung will also be exhibiting his photographic artwork created exclusively for us. Proceeds from the sale of the chocolate eggs and David’s art prints will go towards funding our initiatives in support of Hong Kong’s underprivileged and disadvantaged youths.

“Jo had a meeting with me and our Culinary Director Sheldon, and she told us about the fresh, locally sourced eggs that r é n has just begun selling,” Smita explains. “So naturally, the idea came up to create chocolate eggs for Easter to keep that kind of connection going. I have to say, working with Jo has been great, because she’s very proactive and supportive. If there’s something we can’t find or do, she’ll put in a lot of effort in finding solutions for us or come up with alternative ideas. Mira has worked with r é n a lot, but it’s my first time participating in one of these projects, and it’s been a great experience.”

Part of the preparations will also involve some of our supported youth visiting The Mira later in April to join Smita in wrapping the chocolate eggs in vibrant foil wrappers, and Smita is very much looking forward to working with them.

“It’ll be really fun for both the kids and I to wrap these chocolate eggs together,” Smita says. “I’m very much looking forward to teaching and guiding them on how to handle the chocolate and seeing them do it successfully. I also want them to know that it’s alright to make mistakes, because if we don’t, we will not learn. We have a student now in the kitchen with us from VTC Shine that r é n has placed, and she’s here for six weeks. In the beginning, she was very shy and didn’t speak much. But I told my team to give her some things to make, and I told them that it’s fine if she makes mistakes because that’s how people learn. Eventually, the better she became at the tasks, the more confident she became, and now she comes out of the kitchen and talks to us from time to time. She even had lunch with us recently for the first time since she’s joined. All it took was some encouragement from the team, and the time and space to freely make mistakes. The kids are here to learn, and that’s how we all learn.”